The four national parks Jasper, Banff, Yoho and Kootenay run into each other like four interlocking puzzle pieces. We had been to the first three, so it was time to visit the fourth to finish the quartet.

We turned off toward Radium Hot Springs from Lake Louise and spent the night in a car park just inside Kootenay, amazed at the constant stream of big trucks we could hear going by.

On the road in the morning, our fist stop was at the Alberta-British Columbia boundary. The boundary marks the watershed (flowing to the Pacific or East and North) and had been very carefully drawn up by a big project in the early years.

The border area was the scene of a massive fire in 1968 and is still recovering. In fact, much of the park appeared to have been devastated by fire or by pine beetle, but it was still beautiful, particularly along the huge river.

It was a beautiful day so we decided to make the most of it and go for a decent day hike. We selected the Stanley Glacier Trail. It was a nice hike up through a hanging valley finishing near to the glacier toe with a few marmots around to sweeten the experience further.

Next stop was the Ochre Paint Pots, where iron used to be mined and the soil is still a vivid yellow.

That night we soaked in the third hot springs in national park territory (Radium Hot Springs) which was very enjoyable.While we soaked we talked to a golf-crazed man from Alberta who has driven a ridiculous number of kilometres to play a ridiculous number of rounds of golf all over northern BC (and we thought we were clocking up the kilometres fast).